coyle, a & lyons, e - the social psychology of religion - current research themes

Running Head: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

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Editorial

The Social Psychology of Religion: Current Research Themes

ADRIAN COYLE1 and EVANTHIA LYONS

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1Department of Psychology, University of Surrey, UK

2School of Psychology, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK

Published as:

Coyle, A., & Lyons, E. (2011). The social psychology of religion: Current research themes.

Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 21(6), 461-467.

Correspondence to: Adrian Coyle, Department of Psychology, University of Surrey,

Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom. Phone: +44 (0)1483 686896. Email:

[email protected]

Word count: 3 390 (including acknowledgements and references)


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INTRODUCTION

In the Western world in recent years, concerns about the (potential and actual) social and

political implications of the rise of ‘fundamentalist Islam’ have seen a range of questions

being raised and culturally debated concerning the social risk/value of Islam in particular and

religion in general and its role within the state. These debates have often become polarized,

with anti-religious definitive positions attracting considerable attention, most notably in the

form of Richard Dawkins’ (2006) best-selling book, The God Delusion. This book (and those

embodying the same outlook published around the same time and subsequently) represents

belief in God as irrational and constructs religion as having a corrupting influence on values

and ethics and as having lain at the heart of a variety of social evils across history. This body of

literature has inspired critical responses from religious and, more frequently, specifically

Christian writers (for example, see Beattie, 2007; Ward, 2008).

Some of the questions raised in these debates invoke standard social psychological

concerns such as identity, group processes and intergroup relations, with a focus on trying to

understand what fosters pro-social and anti-social behaviours that appear to be motivated and

justified by religion. These questions have been studied in relation to religion by scholars within

social psychology and within the psychology and sociology of religion, even if the complexity

of the issues identified in this research has not always been reflected in cultural debates. For

example, the Dawkins-related and other literature has sought to defend the Western liberal

‘moral zeitgeist’ against what it has constructed as the threat posed by inherently prejudiced

(fundamentalist) religion. However, social psychological research on prejudice and religion

suggests a complex relationship between the two, with religion potentially promoting prejudice

and also potentially attenuating it, depending upon contextual and mediating factors (see


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Hunsberger & Jackson, 2005). More generally, it has been proposed that to understand

religiously-based social behaviours, it is necessary to see them as regulated by a set of

personal, social and cognitive systems of meanings, with these systems interacting with each

other and with religion (Paloutzian & Silberman, 2003). Such viewpoints are quite different

from the simplistic, decontextualized understandings of religious behaviours that are

sometimes seen within current cultural debates.

It therefore seems an opportune time to review some of the themes that are currently

being explored within research that can be located under the heading of ‘the social

psychology of religion’. However, exactly what constitutes ‘the social psychology of

religion’ is open to debate, as is the nature of broader domain, ‘the psychology of religion’.

The psychology of religion emerged as a distinct sub-discipline in the USA in the latter part of

the twentieth century (and really only began to gather momentum in Britain in the 1990s),

aiming to approach religion from the standpoint of psychology without making assumptions

about particular religious truths and values. The historian of the psychology of religion, Jacob

Belzen (2001), noted that a distinction might be drawn between work that aims to obtain

psychological insight into the particularity of religion and work that aims primarily to test

psychological theory, with religious contexts simply being one of several testing settings.

Depending upon how purist or liberal one’s perspective, the former could be regarded as the

‘genuine’ psychology of religion or both could be seen as legitimately contributing to the

discipline. It was always intended that this special issue would adopt a liberal, inclusive

approach to the social psychology of religion, which is fortunate because the constitutive

papers could be said to embody aspects of both versions, with an additional recurrent

emphasis on using social psychology to identify potentially useful responses to social

challenges relevant to religion or to issue caveats about possible responses.


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An even more fundamental matter of debate concerns the meaning of ‘religion’. There

is a growing awareness that the frequently-encountered Western understanding of religion as

a personality trait-like property of the individual is culturally and historically specific and that

the term is more properly understood as designating a socio-culturally constituted

‘multifarious and multiplex phenomenon’ (Belzen, 2001, p. 46). This has led Belzen (2010)

to argue for conceptualizing the psychology of religion in terms of ‘cultural psychology’.

Whether or not one accepts this particular case, it has been noted by writers on the

psychology of religion and spirituality that religion can be defined as inherently social

(Donahue & Nielsen, 2005, p. 275), which renders a social psychological perspective an

eminently suitable vantage point from which to study religion (the value of a community

psychology perspective has also been advanced, particularly in relation to spirituality: Hill,

2000). A related definitional question concerns the inclusion or exclusion of ‘spirituality’

in/from the foci of the psychology of religion. This has been hotly debated within the domain

(see Pargament, 1999) as it has attempted to develop a useful response to the shift away from

institutional, organized religion and towards less formal, more personal ‘spirituality’ in the

Western post-Christian world (see Heelas & Woodhead, 2005; Tacey, 2004). Given the

definitional diversity that characterizes writing on spirituality (for example, see Zinnbauer et al.,

1997), the decision was taken to restrict this special issue to a consideration of work on the

social psychology of religion.

TOPICS AND THEMES IN THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION


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When we were planning this special issue, we were unsure of the extent of response that

would be elicited by a call for abstracts for potential papers. We were delighted to receive 27

abstracts, mostly from researchers and writers in countries across Europe (Austria, Belgium,

Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom)

but also from the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Social psychological work on

religion is not only being conducted in disparate locations but also with diverse foci.

Although we identified some potential foci in our call for papers, the topics addressed by the

abstracts went well beyond these, covering religious and particularly Islamic identity;

religious-inspired terrorism; religious fundamentalism; religious stereotypes, prejudice and

discrimination; religious minorities and acculturation; religious inter-group and intra-group

conflict; associations between religiousness and authoritarianism, guilt and shame; religion

and attributions of agency; religion and conformity; inter-faith relations; and religion and

Terror Management Theory. The only surprising absence from this list was religious

conversion and related phenomena which have been fairly extensively researched, albeit not

routinely from a social psychological perspective (but one paper in this special issue – by

Grigoropoulou and Chryssochoou – considers the implications of minority group members

adopting the majority’s religion for how the former are perceived by the majority). This

diversity of topics demonstrates the broad scope of the social psychology of religion,

reinforcing a similar message communicated by the range of papers from social and

personality psychology perspectives that appeared in a recent special issue of Personality and

Social Psychology Review on why religiosity persists (Sedikides, 2010).

Fascinating though many of the abstracts that we received were, practical constraints

meant that ultimately we have only been able to present five papers in this special issue.

These are all from European research contexts and reflect something of the diversity of

European social psychology in terms of epistemology, methodology and theory.


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Unsurprisingly, four of the five papers are (at least in part) concerned with representations of

Islam and Islamic identities. As Chris McVittie and colleagues note in their paper, ‘Often

Islam is presented as a religion that, in some respects at least, is essentially antithetical to

Western understandings and practices’, which raises a host of social psychological questions

about Islamic identities and communities in European contexts.

The paper that opens the special issue is from Sue Widdicombe who helpfully

comments on the relationship between psychology and religion before introducing social

constructionist, discursive research approaches. Her adoption of a discursive psychological

approach to Syrian Muslims’ and Christians’ claims about being religious constitutes a novel

contribution to the study of religiousness in the sense of ‘what it means to be religious’.

Through a close analysis of extracts from a large qualitative data set, she examines the

diverse ways in which participants responded to the question ‘Are you religious?’, revealing

the interactional business being transacted in responses to questions about ‘being religious’.

Widdicombe points to the diversity of meanings accorded to the same linguistic features,

such as religious attributes, depending on the different functions those features perform in

different contexts. She uses this reading to question the appropriateness of pre-defining

aspects of ‘being religious’ within decontextualized measures of religiousness in the

psychology of religion and suggests that such measures cannot capture the subtle, inferential

aspects of how people position themselves in relation to ‘religiousness’. This is an important

consideration for the discipline, particularly in work on categories that researchers may be

tempted to treat in stark terms, such as ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘political Islam’.

In the second paper, Vassilis Saroglou, Vincent Yzerbyt and Cécile Kaschten consider

the meta-stereotypes that (mostly Christian) religious believers and non-believers hold about

each other in a country with a predominant Catholic tradition and they link these to existing

literature on religion and personality. We are delighted to be able to present a paper from


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these contributors as they hail from one of the few specialist centres for the psychology of

religion in Europe at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

Among the findings reported in this paper, believers and non-believers seemed to

share the meta-stereotype that the other group saw them as respectively high versus low in

prosociality, conservatism and self-control-related traits. With the exception of prosociality,

they may be happy with these perceptions that are presumably valued differently within each

group. At the same time, believers seemed to ignore the fact that non-believers saw them as

dogmatic, and non-believers often seemed to meta-stereotypically exaggerate their

differences in comparison to how believers actually saw them. Most meta-perceptions that

Saroglou and colleagues found accord with the literatures on religiousness, personality,

values and behaviours and on religious stereotypes. This allows the researchers to conclude

that, at least to some extent, there is some broad accuracy in the meta-perceptions held by the

groups of believers and non-believers. However, they go beyond merely noting this and pose

questions for future research about the reasons for this accuracy, wondering ‘does this

accuracy reflect personal experience and thus generalized knowledge of the real personality

of believers and non-believers or does it simply reflect shared implicit theories and

ideologies?’

In their reflections upon other findings, the nature of the sample of believers as a

majority group and non-believers as a minority group in the Belgian context becomes

relevant. The processes that are suggested to operate in relation to these statuses would be

different in a context where believers were a minority and non-believers a majority. Yet,

given that people may be reluctant to self-identify explicitly as non-believers and may self-

present as believers in a qualified way and given Davie’s (1994) contention about ‘believing

without belonging’, we may need to inquire further into what self-identifications as a

‘believer’ or ‘non-believer’ mean in practice in people’s lives.


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The paper by Nikolitsa Grigoropoulou and Xenia Chryssochoou is also concerned

with perceptions held by one group about (an)other group(s) in Greece. As noted earlier,

using an experimental research design, they explored Greek-Orthodox students’ responses to

a fictitious character who was variously described as belonging to a religious minority with

Greek citizenship or to an ethnically and religiously different immigrant group and who

decided either to adopt the majority’s religion or to maintain his religious position. Findings

indicated that when the character decided to adopt the majority’s religion, he was considered

more ‘Greek’. Curiously, though, participants showed greater agreement with the character’s

decision when he decided to maintain his original religious position: religious assimilation

did not seem to be the majority’s preferred strategy for minorities. The researchers call for

further investigation of the reasons for this.

Perhaps the most startling finding reported by any of the papers concerned the

majority’s response to the character when he was described as Albanian Muslim or atheist

and as having decided to become Greek-Orthodox. When described as belonging to other

minority groups, the character was perceived as less identified with the minority ingroup after

adopting the majority religion but when described as Albanian, he was deemed to remain

highly identified with the minority group after conversion. Although the social response to

the Albanian minority in Greece could be seen as context-specific, on the basis of their range

of findings the authors suggest that the acculturation strategy recommended to and adopted

by minorities may not be what matters in how they are perceived by the majority, even when

the strategy is as extreme as adopting the majority’s religion. Rather, for minorities that are

deemed particularly threatening for whatever reason, it may be that ‘in reality what matters is

“who they are”’.

Muslim identities are examined specifically in the final two papers. Using discourse

analysis, Chris McVittie, Andy McKinlay and Rahul Sambaraju scrutinized media interviews


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with leaders of the Islamist Hamas movement concerning Islam within the Gaza strip in

Palestine and noted how different forms of Muslim identities are mobilized by speakers in

talk about intergroup relations. In their discussion of the nature and implications of a

proposed Islamic state, speakers address the relationship between religion and civic

society/politics, thus connecting to contemporary debates within the Western world. Through

their close analysis of data, McVittie and colleagues demonstrate the standard social

constructionist understanding of identities as tied up with local interactional contexts and

concerns, such as the deflection of competing constructions of an Islamic state. To this

extent, the paper could be said to exemplify one branch of Belzen’s (2001) dual account of

the domain in which researchers’ primary focus is on more general psychological phenomena

(in this case, understood broadly), with the religious aspect of their work being more

contextual rather than a central concern. The other discourse analytic paper by Sue

Widdicombe seems to strike a different balance in that it is thoroughly social constructionist

whilst placing religion at the centre of its concerns around the negotiation of claims to be

religious.

That same emphasis can be seen in the final paper in which Nick Hopkins explores

religion, identity and ‘social capital’ (the connections among individuals and groups). He

reports some qualitative analysis but his contribution is primarily a commentary within a

critical social psychology perspective, albeit a more integrative one than the discourse

analytic, non-cognitivist approach that characterizes much critical social psychology.

Emphasizing the contingency of identity in relation to context (thereby echoing the analyses

of Widdicombe and of McVittie and colleagues) and thus the wider social processes that any

meaningful examination of identity must take into account, he illustrates these points through

consideration of interview data relevant to Muslim identity in Britain and considers the

implications of different constructions of Muslim identity for how social capital is produced.


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However, his paper does not simply explore theoretical questions but carries practical

implications for social interventions with minority religious groups. For example, Hopkins

characterizes inter-faith dialogue as a possible ‘bridging’ form of social capital, creating

connections between religious groups. However, he notes that ‘bonding’ capital may need to

be fostered within groups before they can engage in bridging activity without group identity

being threatened by the possible highlighting of within-group diversity during dialogue (or

during any other bridging activity).

CONCLUSION

It is important to acknowledge that the concerns explored by the papers in this special issue

do not ‘belong’ to social psychology but have been examined from other disciplinary vantage

points too, such as sociology, anthropology and politics. The social psychology of religion

might profitably draw ideas from the study of religion in those disciplines to produce

enriched understandings. Scholars in those disciplines might usefully reciprocate when

exploring topics with social psychological relevance, such as religious identities, and/or

social psychologists might draw research questions from relevant work in other disciplines

and extend its analyses through the application of social psychological theories and concepts.

While academic exchange across disciplines is worthwhile for producing rich

analyses, the evident potential across papers for using social psychology to identify informed

and constructive responses to social challenges relevant to religion reminds us of the applied

value of work in this area. For example, in its suggestion about the need to foster bonding


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capital within groups in preparation for bridging activities, Nick Hopkins’ paper could be said

to reach beyond social psychology and to carry potential for contributing fruitfully to the

domain of practical theology and community interventions around inter-faith relations.

Indeed, questions about meaningful engagement with the religious ‘Other’ that are relevant to

inter-faith relations are raised and/or addressed across this special issue. It might thus be said

that the papers underline the potential for fruitful dialogue and an exchange and integration of

insights between social psychology, practical theology and other domains of community

practice in relation to fostering constructive relations between religious groups (although

Grigoropoulou and Chryssochoou’s findings remind us of the challenges involved). Also, it is

important to acknowledge that bringing (social) psychology and theology or religious bodies

together as dialogue partners may not be easy owing to fundamental differences in

ontological and epistemological assumptions and wariness about the scope of each party’s

interpretative entitlement (for example, see Ormerod, 2005). Ironically the processes that

Hopkins highlights in his paper may need to be fostered among the disciplinary, professional

and community bodies involved in trying to facilitate constructive relations between religious

groups.


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance and understanding that we received

from Sandra Schruijer and Flora Cornish in their editorial roles as we conceived this special

issue and brought it to fruition. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to all

those who provided reviews of the papers that we received: Christopher Cohrs (Queen’s

University, Belfast); Joanna Collicutt (Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford); Mick Finlay

(Anglia Ruskin University); Stephen Gibson (York St John University); Ralph Hood

(University of Tennessee); Abigail Locke (University of Huddersfield); Patrick Martens

(Queen’s University, Belfast); Ola Musleh (Bethlehem University); Müjde Peker (Boğaziçi

University, Turkey); Ralph Piedmont (Loyola University Maryland); Bernd Simon

(Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel); Clifford Stevenson (University of Limerick);

Andrew Todd (Cardiff University); Karen Trew (Queen’s University, Belfast); Chris Walton

(Lancaster University); and Hanna Zagefka (Royal Holloway, University of London).


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Davie, G. (1994). Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without belonging. Oxford:

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Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. London: Bantam Press.

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